Just 30 kilometres from the centre of Shanghai stands Thames Town, an extravagant development that opened in 2006 and boasts all the features a foreigner might expect to find in an English market town - minus the residents.
Features include a medieval market square, a church based on one in Clifton, near Bristol, a village green, a garden maze, a mock castle, a traditional English pub and fish-and-chip shop, and statues of Winston Churchill, Princess Diana, Harry Potter and James Bond.
Patrolled by security guards in Beefeater-style red coats, the only clues in the meandering backstreets that you aren't really in Britain are the air-conditioning units at the back of the red-brick Georgian-style townhouses.
A British engineer and a town-planning company were hired to mastermind Thames Town, which was designed for 10,000 residents in houses with prices ranging from about three million yuan (HK$3.7 million) to four million yuan.
Developers claimed 75 per cent of the homes were sold before Thames Town officially opened, but if that is true, it seems few of the buyers have taken the trouble to move in. Visitors describe it as a 'virtual ghost town' with empty houses and unused roads - and complain that even the fish-and-chip shop is closed. Most days, the only people in the streets are the security guards and couples seeking unusual settings for their pre-wedding photographs.
One visitor says on an internet blog: 'There's a high street of shops with names like Mike's Records and The Fish Bar. All of them are empty shells. It's eerie to walk around. There are cobbles, wooden beams, double yellow lines, telephone boxes and street after street of nothing.'